Author: Arthur Martinez-Tebbel

Box Office Democracy: Deadpool

Deadpool is a good superhero movie that people are going to convince themselves was an excellent superhero movie. It’s got a couple good action beats, it feels like a cohesive part of a larger universe without being overly constrained, it has a serviceable (and age appropriate) love story, and it’s clever… but not quite as clever as it thinks it is. You can wink at the camera and tell me that you know that you’re doing all of the usual genre clichés, but that doesn’t make the clichés any less boring. I wanted Deadpool to be a movie that broke the mold, but instead it just spends a lot of time telling you it’s better than the mold and not showing you.

Ryan Reynolds is kind of a fiat movie star; he’s handsome and famous but if you look at his credits it doesn’t seem like an impressive career. I have very few distinct memories of Ryan Reynolds performances but I do remember leaving Green Lantern and thinking, “This movie was kinda bad but it wasn’t Ryan Reynolds’s fault.” These are not the kind of ringing endorsements that careers are built on, but Reynolds feels like the perfect choice to play Wade Wilson. He’s funny and charming and the self-deprecation feels a little more real because he isn’t an A-list actor in his own right. The only other actor I could even imagine playing this part with the same zeal is James Franco, and that’s an objectively worse choice (although think of all the Spider-Man 3 jokes we could have gotten). Everything that doesn’t work about Deadpool is saved by Reynolds’s overwhelming performance, and all the things that work are pushed to even greater heights.

The rest of the cast fine but there are precious few standouts among them. I’m fond of Morena Baccarin but this part, even as the female lead, is small and gives her very little room to show anything. Gina Carano is the most imposing woman working in film this side of Gwendoline Christie and she looks like a million bucks in this, her second consecutive feature film that’s barely asked her to talk. T.J. Miller plays a comic relief character in a movie full of comic relief characters, and while he hits every punchline I never wished he was on screen more often. Ed Skrein might do the movie the biggest disservice as the main villain Ajax, as he’s just so unbelievably boring that while I want Deadpool to get his revenge I wish he could do it without having to hear another generic British bad guy deliver generic bad guy dialogue. Brianna Hildebrand seems like she could be a breakout star if she’s given enough chances to play Negasonic Teenage Warhead, although she’s certainly not in the next X-Men movie, would likely feel shoehorned in to any sequels in this franchise, and might simply never get another chance.

So I’m generally fond of the acting in Deadpool, and the action is a solid B+ (even if three of the top five moments were given away for free in the trailer) but where it fails to deliver for me is in the story. This is the same origin story then damsel in distress formula I’ve seen a thousand times. I was tempted to use hyperbole and say a million but I’m confident it has actually been at least a thousand times by this point. Deadpool loves to show how it knows that it’s a movie and how familiar it is with all these tropes but it isn’t brave enough to actually break out of them in any way. I’m sick of origin stories and telling me I’m going to see one doesn’t make it better. I’m slightly less sick of hostage girlfriends but only because a lot of movies don’t bother to develop enough characters to have compelling alternative hostages. It’s also disappointing that for all the snark they have about the genre that they direct none of it at the sexualized violence the genre is often bogged down in and even contributes some for itself. Deadpool is going to get credit for being clever and subversive and it’s only doing those things at a four out of ten and for it to feel real I need them to aim much higher.

I’m happy that Deadpool exists and I enjoyed watching it (when I wasn’t groaning at the idea of watching another person get experimented on until they develop super powers) but it isn’t there yet, and I hope the praise it’s getting doesn’t make it sit on its laurels. There’s a spark of great potential here and I’m instantly more excited for Deadpool 2 than I am for any superhero movie that isn’t Civil War because it could actually be something unique and clever. Deadpool is a great first step but I need them to keep going.

 

Box Office Democracy: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

I wanted more out of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Or less, much much less would have been fine too. The amount I got was entirely insufficient.

It’s a cute idea mashing up this drama about early 19th century romance, class, and all that comes with it with a zombie movie, but in an hour and 45 minutes it doesn’t get enough time to do either thing proper amounts of justice and so none of it seems to matter. Either this is a serious thing and it needed more time, space, and gravity; or this is a silly joke and it needed to be a 20-minute sketch on the Internet. As released, it seems insubstantial and empty.

I have no compelling reason to think what I really want is more of the manners drama. I don’t watch Downton Abbey, I haven’t read the book Pride and Prejudice, I don’t even really like watching BBC America for more than a couple hours at a time. The surface-level telling of this side of the story is about what I want. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies makes me think I could deliver a sixth grade book report on the original novel and be laughed out of any serious discussion. For example, I looked up the Wikipedia article on George Wickham to see how radically the character was changed for the zombified version of the story and practically couldn’t understand any of what it was talking about. It’s like getting the Cliff’s Notes version of the story and it’s hard not to feel a little bit cheated by that.

The zombie story also feels underdeveloped. The film starts with a good action beat and hits a few horror beats early on but then they mostly fade away. After this early burst of action the whole thing fades to the background. There’s an action beat in a cellar in the second act that I couldn’t make heads or tails of because there was no light, it never seemed like scaring me with zombies was even a remote priority until the third act.

There are gestures towards a larger plot, like when a zombie comes and talks to Elizabeth and tries to warn her of something before being blown away, and numerous allusions to the Four Horsemen of the Zombie Apocalypse, but nothing ever comes from either of these things. The Horsemen are glimpsed on screen twice but never interact with anyone. I suppose they serve to kind of underline the markings for a third act twist but this is such a dramatic device to have no direct payoff. I got the distinct sense that Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was telling only the third best zombie story going on in this universe in this time period.

This is going to sound insincere after three paragraphs of being so intensely critical but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies isn’t completely unsatisfying. It might be formed from two underdeveloped halves but there are compelling things about the whole. Seeing a zombie outbreak in a pre-modern society is a refreshing take on a done-to-death genre and simply seeing cannons and muskets being used to fight undead swarms has a certain charm to it after seeing a thousand shotguns. The juxtaposition of the prim and proper pre-Victorian England with the ruthlessness of a never-ending swarm of undead is quite funny (the first few times) and the some of the characters follow this path to the absurd conclusion to remarkable affect (Matt Smith and Lena Headey are particularly notable examples). I’m just not sure this is a punch line worthy of an entire movie. When I saw the book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the shelf of my local bookstore I thought nothing about reading it would be as amusing as looking at the image on the cover, and they adapted it in to a movie that by the end is struggling to be as compelling as the poster.

Box Office Democracy: Kung Fu Panda 3

Kung Fu Panda 3

I had no interest in seeing either of the first two Kung Fu Panda movies. I thought they were a place for a brand of Jack Black shtick that I had grown tired of by the time 2008 got here (for the record: peak Jack Black was 2003’s School of Rock). I had a strong idea of what these movies were, and I didn’t want anything to do with it. As far as Kung Fu Panda 3 is concerned, I was wrong. This is a charming movie, a funny movie, sometimes even a touching movie. I regretted nothing about my time spent watching Kung Fu Panda 3, and it’s the first movie of 2016 to make me feel that way.

Kung Fu Panda 3 tells a story I was happy to hear told. Po (Black) is told he needs to start teaching the rest of his action team (voiced by a perplexing mix of stars from Angelina Jolie to David Cross to Jackie Chan) and he’s terrible at it so he needs to find his inner self just as his long lost father returns and an unbeatable opponent returns from beyond the grave. It’s not the most intricate story, and there were things set up that never got paid off to my satisfaction— like a pivotal character always nervously saying he was “sent by the universe” sounds more like an evasion than the actual eventual truth. This isn’t a movie that wants to be deep; it’s a movie that wants to be fake deep and it does a fine job at that. It keeps the jokes apart from the fight scenes and provided some touching moments between Po and his biological father (Bryan Cranston) and his adoptive father (James Hong) that get to some real places.

The action scenes were better than I expected them to be, but I’ve since realized that was a low bar to get over. Dreamworks typically does good work but their action is usually more frenetic than it is good, I suspect it’s hard to get any material that would look as good as humans doing it just because of how their art style tends toward flatter character designs. I thoroughly enjoyed all of the fight scenes particularly because of how they used the individual animals to different effect. A crane did not fight like and alligator did not fight like a panda. The disappointing exceptions were Master Monkey, who is probably just a bit too person-like to have a distinct style, and Master Tigress, who was also just too much like a human to be exciting. Again, not having seen the previous two entries in this series perhaps none of this was new, fresh, or exciting but it was sort of a delight for me.

It feels weird having to say this, or that it feels like a point of recognition, but I appreciated that no one in this movie was doing an accent. There’s a long shameful tradition in Hollywood of over the top accents, and I’m so glad we’re past that here. It feels generally culturally sensitive, although mostly by being so generic about everything that it’s impossible to feel it being specific enough to be offensive. I did not care for their depiction of dumplings being quite so big though— where are these animals getting dumplings that are universally the size of bao?

If this review were itself a movie made for children I would be learning an important lesson about judging a book by its cover, but it isn’t and I’m not. Instead, I think I’m learning a lesson about the ever-improving work coming out of Dreamworks as they move away from being “the House That Shrek Built” and towards being the people that brought you How to Train Your Dragon. It also might be a lesson about coming back to Jack Black after so many years away, he might not be as stale as I thought although I feel for the parents who had to deal with their children responding to everything they were told this weekend with “chitty chitty chat chat” emulating the climax of this film. Kung Fu Panda 3 is a good movie. Although, it is possible that after Norm of the North, any competent animated movie was going to seem like Citizen Kane. It’s probably actually a good movie.

Box Office Democracy: The 5th Wave

The 5th Wave is a great trailer and a mediocre movie. There are some big ideas and ambitious visuals but they all made the advertisements and don’t take up much more room in the actual movie. What we get for the price of our ticket is a lot of watching characters move around the woods alone or in small groups. It almost never feels like the big action is happening on screen. It’s the kind of book adaptation where I’m sure the novel is a much more satisfying experience and am not sure why anyone bothered to make the film.

I want to talk more about the plot (and that will need to be behind a spoiler warning) and while I feel like I need to get some discussion of the non-plot aspects of this movie, they’re all just sort of there. The acting is not exceptional but by no means bad; I hope we get a bigger focus on some of the other kids if this turns into the franchise it so desperately wants to be. The visual effects, while used sparingly, are totally passable. There’s a palpable sense of dread several times during the film and I’m sure that’s the whole point of the endeavor, but looking back on it a day later I can remember only one such moment clearly. Honestly, my biggest technical complaint is that the quarantine zone looks a little sparsely populated, like they decided they could skimp on extras or something. The 5th Wave is technically sound and thoroughly inoffensive.

From here on I want to talk about the details of the plot and while I found it a bit predictable, you might not— so be warned.

The plan of the alien invaders felt distinctly like the result of a planning meeting you would see on a Saturday Night Live sketch. The aliens start their invasion with an Electromagnetic Pulse that permanently destroys all the technology on earth (and the awesome plane crash you see in the trailer), then they cause a series of massive earthquakes that also cause gigantic tsunamis and kill a bunch of people, and then they have this super version of the bird flu that kills most of the people that contract it. Up until this point these have been some ambitious plans that seem designed to eliminate the population in a relatively efficient manner. From there the plan becomes a convoluted mess: the aliens are going to assume human form, they’re going to tell the humans that they can assume human form to get them to turn against each other, they’re going to completely take over the military and train an army of child soldiers to think that other humans are really aliens so the child soldiers will kill the remaining humans. How is that their best plan? It seems just monstrously inefficient. It’s like the aliens spent their entire invasion budget on the earthquakes and the virus and just had to wing it. It leads to maybe one good Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment but I correctly predicted 100% of the aliens sitting in the theater so it wasn’t a slam-dunk. The more The 5th Wave told me what it was about, the less interesting it became.

The 5th Wave is the inevitable result of plugging every Young Adult novel that girls like into the Hollywood machine and releasing whatever comes out of the other end. It’s not good enough to be The Hunger Games, fresh enough to be Twilight, indecipherable enough to be The Maze Runner, or whatever Divergent is. It doesn’t seem to have a place except to just be a kind of YA wallpaper. There are germs of good ideas here and characters I wouldn’t be completely opposed to seeing more of if this takes off and becomes a franchise but I also wouldn’t remember or care if it just fades away an becomes nothing. The 5th Wave is the unfortunate symbol of progress, as a new thing becomes just another thing.

Box Office Democracy: Norm of the North

Norm of the North is the worst movie I’ve ever seen in a theater. There was not a single aspect of this movie that indicated that any more than the minimum amount of effort was expended by anyone in the production process. It’s a lifeless dud all the way around; the kind of movie that had me wondering if I could get away with walking out after the first half hour and reviewing the delicious burrito I ate for lunch instead. But I endured, and instead I’m here to tell you about this wretched disaster of a movie.

I have no stomach for lazy animation. Norm of the North is some of the worst animation work I’ve ever seen. The character models have a bizarre lack of detail and the textures often feel slapped on. There’s a killer whale character in the first act of the movie that looks like a concept drawing for an Alien xenomorph. The environments are flat including the most lifeless depiction of New York City I’ve seen on film since I Am Legend. There’s no activity in the background unless it is going to directly involve itself with the scene. Everything about the visual language of the film communicates that this is a dead world inhabited by haunting marionettes made by someone who had never seen a person or an animal with their own eyes. I don’t think Pixar, Dreamworks, or Disney would put out animation this bad for an interstitial scene on a mobile app, let alone a feature film, because it would be too embarrassing, I wish Norm of the North felt the same shame.

When my father saw substandard animation he would often say it would be better off as a radio play, and that is absolutely not the case with this film. This movie strains my suspension of disbelief at every turn in a way that a movie about Dracula running a hotel never did. The events and character motivations never feel organic or even like they follow naturally from the scene that preceded it, just like it was picked from whatever goldfish bowl passed for a rewrite here. It’s not clever, it’s not funny, it’s not provocative, and it’s just there because something needs to happen. There’s a hodgepodge of attempted morals that are adopted and dropped as soon as the scene is over it doesn’t even seem particularly committed to the stated goal of protecting the arctic.

I’m almost okay with Norm of the North being a terrible movie— mistakes happen even if they seem to involve two production companies and a major distributor having no idea what a coherent film are— but this isn’t just a bad movie, this wants to be a terrible franchise. The lemmings seem designed to be a spin-off property like the Minions before them (they got almost all of the laughs in my audience) and God forbid we allow those things to happen organically anymore. The “Arctic Shake” dance numbers come out of nowhere and have no service to plot or character, so I can only conclude there’s a nefarious piece of merchandise around the corner or some desire to go viral.

Reading that last sentence I get that I sound a little unhinged, as if I’m suffering from some sort of acute Norm of the North derangement, but that’s where I’m at with this movie. It was bad, worse than normal bad movies, worse than Pixels (the movie I just named the worst of 2015), it’s a movie so horrible that I find it hard to believe it’s a simple failure and instead begin to see it as an elaborate conspiracy to make a movie so insulting to the taste of any reasonable viewer. I would believe this move was the result of a bet between two executives about how bad a movie could be and still make a profit. I would believe this was some kind of Producers-esque scam and has been financed several times its budget only to be a surefire failure. Anything is better than believing this is an honest effort to make a good film, because it’s so heart wrenching to imagine that the gigantic team responsible for an animated movie could fail so spectacularly. It hurts to think of years of collective effort turning out this boring, ugly, nonsense.

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ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Bottom 6 Movies of 2015

comicmixsix600-550x121-5283243As much as I loved my top 6 movies, I loathe these movies. The competition for worst movie of 2015 was so fierce I had to leave off The Last Witch Hunter, a movie so bad it made me dislike Vin Diesel, Hollywood’s most perfect man. That said, none of these movie are even close to as bad as that wretched animated Oz sequel from 2014, I won’t even name that movie for fear that the parade of angry Kickstarter backers will find me again.  

  1. Fantastic Four – There are a lot of good reasons to make a movie that costs $120 million but it’s quite apparent that spite isn’t one of them. Fantastic Four is a movie that only exists so Fox retains the rights to the franchise presumably so they can sell them back to Marvel for some insane price, because they clearly have no interest in making a good movie. Fantastic Four is a stunningly boring movie considering it’s supposed to be about dimensional rifts, super powers, and existential threats. The movie we got was directionless and drab, and you’ll never convince me that the ending wasn’t hastily written on the back of a napkin on a late day of reshoots.
  1. Tomorrowland – I’m aware that historically Disney theme park attractions have not made good movies— for every Pirates of the Caribbean there has been The Haunted Mansion, The Country Bears, and even a Tower of Terror. A good ride is pretty self-contained and probably shouldn’t leave the audience wanting a lot of extra backstory. Tomorrowland is a movie that is nothing but endless interminable backstory waiting for a moment of satisfying action that never comes. That a movie this boring came from the collaboration of Brad Bird and George Clooney is a crime against the entire film industry and I hope we’re free of this lazy style of creative malfeasance once and for all. (We are certainly not.)
  1. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials – Holy cow, what a batch of hot nonsense this movie was. I’m generally okay with a sequel being a little hard to understand for people who haven’t seen the original movie; it lets the movie push some boundaries in exchange for not having to retread the same expositional grounds. What I’m not okay with is being completely lost while watching the sequel to a movie I saw the first time around. The Scorch Trials was a series of flimsily connected events that I never saw the narrative thread for. Why were there alien fish monsters in glass tubes? Why was the desert filled with zombies? Where were they ever going? Why did it take days and days to get from the city to the forest and 20 minutes to get back? The Scorch Trials has no interest in answering any of these questions and it’s only surprising performances by Giancarlo Esposito, Alan Tudyk, and some truly awful pieces of filmmaking keeping this from being much higher on this list.
  1. Home/Minions – Good children’s movies are some of my favorite things to watch but similarly I hold a special enmity for the bad ones that feel like cheap attempts to get easy money from parents who need two hours of relief. Home is a movie with nothing new to say and no interesting way to say it. The main character is Sheldon Cooper turned one notch higher and a little girl separated from her mother that never quite makes you feel badly for her. Pixar made me cry for the personification of human emotions and the plight of a dinosaur farmer this year but Home couldn’t even get me a little sad for the ruined life of a small child. That’s not an ok way to tell a story.

    While Home is a bad movie, Minions is the expression of a bad system. Minions exists to make money and sell toys and the quality of the movie is a distant afterthought. Minions is a commercial broken up with borrowed bits of slapstick (none more recent than Honey, I Blew Up the Kid) but is counting on the notion that none of their target audience has seen it before. I had more fun riding the tie-in ride at Universal Studios than I did sitting through Minions, but I suppose I didn’t have to sit and watch the ride for 91 minutes.

  1. Hot Pursuit – Hot Pursuit is a comedy that has neither a clever plot nor any funny jokes. I’m tempted to just stop there and move on to the next entry on this list because there’s really nothing else a comedy could give you after it fails at that but Hot Pursuit just kept on failing. Almost every character was completely unbelievable as a human being that exists on the planet earth and the only one that felt real was Sofia Vergara’s character and that’s not because it’s actually realistic but because she plays this exact same character so often that I’ve come to accept it as truth in some kind of bizarre pop culture Stockholm syndrome. Hot Pursuit felt like torture to watch at 87 minutes, long and that was despite shelling out extra money that week to see it in a theater with reclining seats and waiter service. Booze and a brownie sundae couldn’t save Hot Pursuit, and it’s a rare movie those won’t help at least a little.
  1. Pixels – There’s a time when I would consider Pixels a special kind of bad but it isn’t. It’s exactly the kind of bad that Happy Madison puts out on a consistent basis. In 16 years they’ve put out one mediocre movie (Funny People) and 37 pieces of unwatchable garbage. They share similar casts and similar jokes and never aspire to be anything even remotely substantive. I don’t think every movie needs to be some profound meditation on the human condition, but they could at least give me a new dick joke or something. Pixels is a cynical movie that seems to hate its target audience. It doesn’t treat its subject matter seriously. It makes Wreck-It Ralph look like Citizen Kane. It was excruciating to watch and I’m quite happy I’ll never have to watch it ever again.
ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Top 6 Movies of 2015

ComicMix Six: Box Office Democracy’s Top 6 Movies of 2015

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When I started making this list I was very down on 2015 but I was wrong. I was delighted to relive all of these films; 2015 was a fantastic year.

Honorable Mention: Get Hard – Get Hard is not a movie I reviewed for this site or even one I saw theatrically but rather on an airplane. The marketing for Get Hard was so unappealing to me, but I laughed harder while watching it than I did at any other movie this year. It had all of the uncomfortable moments where this or that rape joke or borderline racist moment happens but it’s overpowered by better jokes and a better attitude. I’m not much for movie quotes anymore but I have found myself saying “You are a disappointment to your parents, who I fucked” a few too many times for polite conversation and that’s got to be worth something.

  1. Furious 7/The Big Short – These are the movies that are probably not good enough to be on this list that I just couldn’t bring myself to cut. In their individual ways these films were both made for me. Furious 7 is not as good as Fast Five or Fast & Furious 6 but the goodwill from those sublime pieces of action cinema is too strong in me. I can’t dislike that movie even if the action sequences might be finally tipping over the edge of my suspension of disbelief and even if the characters might be getting a little too cartoony I love it too much. The touching tribute to Paul Walker is just icing on the cake.Similarly as a economics major who now works as a film critic I’m not sure any film has ever been aimed quite so squarely at me than The Big Short. Explaining the 2008 financial collapse in an understandable way is a herculean task and they accomplish it with no lack of gusto. The acting and the directing are also fantastic, but they feel a little too much like they’re aiming for awards to rate higher on this list. I don’t go to baseball games to see the players swing for the fences with every at bat, and I would appreciate a little more subtlety in my cinema as well.
  1. Inside Out – The real brilliance of Inside Out is in the simplicity of the idea. Of course our emotions are different people inside our heads just like of course our toys come to life when we aren’t looking. It just makes an intrinsic amount of sense. Inside Out is a simple story told very well with dizzying highs and devastating emotional lows and that kind of journey is rare in any movie and even more so in movies intended for children. That Pixar has made this kind of filmmaking so routine is a testament to their sublime artistry and I’m so happy to have them around.
  1. Straight Outta Compton – It’s been a long time coming for a serious filmmaker to make a movie about the dawn of hip-hop in a way that respects its audience, acknowledges the political reality that was urban America in the mid-80s, and respects the artistry the same way the endless parade of rock biopics have done over the years. Straight Outta Compton fulfils that promise and more. I hate when people describe actors as “channeling” a real person when they portray them on film but I feel myself reaching for that word when I want to describe how uncanny the acting performances were in this film. The icing on the cake is how relevant the struggles with the police feel even 30 years later because of the myriad ways nothing has really changed.

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Box Office Democracy: The Big Short

I probably don’t need to explain bubble economies to anyone reading this website.

In the mid-90s following a boom period, fueled by the idea that all comic books were guaranteed to increase in value, the comic book industry suffered a collapse that closed two-thirds of comic book stores nationwide. If it weren’t for their bankability as movie and TV properties, it might have forever pushed comic books to the fringes of the American consciousness. I don’t need to explain the volatility of an inflated market to a comic book fan, but if you’d like to see why the financial collapse of 2008 was the same kind of thing magnified 1000x by greed and fraud, I think you’d enjoy The Big Short.

My degree is in economics and I’ve always felt I had a good handle on the 2008 collapse (in fact, despite some of the claims in the film it wasn’t the complete surprise it’s portrayed as) but I’ve struggled to explain it to people, and The Big Short does an amazing job making complicated topics accessible. Director Adam McKay doesn’t hesitate to have characters break the fourth wall to explain the more complicated financial terms, and even brings in celebrity guests to do little vignettes demonstrating more complicated concepts providing clever and offbeat opportunities to bury some clunky exposition. That along with some healthy repetition makes the whole thing easy to understand. The Big Short is a masterful breakdown of a terrible time that I sincerely hope makes filmgoers good and angry.

Everyone in The Big Short seems to be acting as if they think every scene could end up on their Oscar reel. It’s good, but it’s good in that way where you can kind of see how much effort is going in to the performances. Steve Carell is hitting his accent just as hard as he can, and his righteous indignation burns smoldering hot. Christian Bale is playing is playing a character with Asperger’s, and his commitment to nail all the associated eccentricities is admirable but sometimes the seams show. Ryan Gosling is charming and funny and gets a higher laugh per line ratio than anyone else, and honestly probably speaks more than he has in his last three movies combined. It feels a little strange to want to ding a movie for everyone acting so well, but there was such a strong feeling of effort that was just a touch off-putting in an otherwise excellent film.

I suppose I was also a little uncomfortable with the insistence of playing so many of these characters as heroes for their role in the financial collapse. While none of them created the bubble or did anything specifically unethical, there doesn’t seem to be a herculean effort undertaken to stop it. They see something wrong, some of them make a token effort to stop it and then they make staggering amounts of money off of being right. Even Brad Pitt who seems inserted in to the movie solely to provide indignation on behalf of those who will be hurt when the economy collapses, doesn’t do anything to stop anything. If this is supposed to be a real takedown of the excesses of the system that almost destroyed the world less than a decade ago I wish it were a little harsher on the people who were simply willing to claim a slight moral high ground while pocketing nine figure sums for their trouble.

Box Office Democracy: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The first movie I ever reviewed was Attack of the Clones and I gave it a rave review, the kind of review I would never give it now that I consider it to be arguably the worst movie in the entire franchise. In my defense, I was 17 years old and mostly just didn’t know better when it came to dialogue, character arcs, or any facets of compelling filmmaking that weren’t balls-to-the-wall lightsaber fights. I walked out of every one of the prequels happy and only turned on them with time and perspective, and that’s why I’m afraid now to write about how thoroughly I enjoyed The Force Awakens because now these words might actually stick around.

From here on out I’m going to talk about the plot so if that’s not what you’re interested in, now is the time to head somewhere else.

There aren’t a lot of new story beats in The Force Awakens, in fact it seems like it follows the road map from A New Hope faithfully, but after hearing George Lucas go on and on for years about how the prequels were supposed to “rhyme” with the original trilogy this is hardly surprising. We don’t come to Star Wars for original or complex plots, we come for the skillful implementation of iconic moments. This is a franchise that started by ripping off Hidden Fortress and hasn’t had a great many original ideas since that weren’t about selling toys in fun new ways. The Force Awakens is a story I’ve heard many times before in a more dynamic wrapping.

J.J. Abrams is a better director than George Lucas in every way that counts, and it is almost cruel how they show that off. The original trilogy understandably looks a little dated at this point three decades in the future but fancy visual effects aside the prequel trilogy has aged terribly, they simply don’t share a visual vocabulary with their peers. The shots are largely static and the compositions boring; there seem to be more variety in the transitory wipes than in the set-ups. Abrams has a lot of flaws but he know how to move a camera and he knows how to shoot a good action scene and that’s more than enough to knock this movie out of the park. There’s one sequence that feels like a lumpy, out of place, mashup of Firefly and Men in Black full of just-too-cutsey cameos, but other than that I was suitably riveted to my seat for the entire film and that’s becoming more and more rare for me.

I love all of the new principal characters without reservation. John Boyega is utterly fantastic as Finn. He’s able to display such a depth of turmoil, he instantly becomes one of the most kinetic characters in the entire mythos. I’ve been a huge fan of his since Attack the Block and I’m thrilled to see him live up to all that promise and more here. Daisy Ridley is the new face of the franchise, and the way she shows the scars of her abandonment while similarly embodying the Luke Skywalker role for a new trilogy is most impressive. She doesn’t get a striking hero shot gazing in to a binary sunset, but she nails everything else about being a Star Wars protagonist. Her facial expression work in the climactic battle is worth the price of admission alone. Oscar Isaac is underused but his charisma is so strong he looms large over the movie and is just so alarmingly good looking, I’m not sure it’s safe to photograph him much more anyway. I liked Adam Driver more in his turn as Kylo Ren than I’ve liked him in anything else I’ve seen him in. He does about half the work in the biggest, most impactful scene in the movie and he feels right in that spot. He’s everything that Alec Guinness, Harrison Ford, or Ewan McGregor brought to this franchise and those names are good company.

The Force Awakens is a good action movie, it builds off of and feeds the endless churn of mythos needed to keep Star Wars afloat as an intellectual property, it creates new and interesting characters, and it gives them compelling places to do exciting things in. I don’t know what to want besides this. It isn’t exactly the same as seeing A New Hope for the first time when I was five years old… but nothing ever will be. This is the modernization the franchise needed, and it’s as good or better than every sequel I ever chased through mediocre novels throughout the years.

Star Wars is back and better than ever.

Box Office Democracy: Krampus

It’s entirely possible that I am simply too old to enjoy Krampus. The built-in audience for the movie seems to be families with perhaps older kids who still want to see a movie together for the holidays. It’s a safe movie in that way, with broad humor and a more passive approach to scaring people that relies less on jumps and thrills and more on the idea of stuff that happens out of frame. It didn’t work for me at all, it seems like a spectacular waste of a gifted cast to make them do such tired, dreary material. And while I can be a bit wimpy at times during horror movies, I certainly prefer scared to bored.

Krampus has the kind of cast that you would expect to be capable of elevating any material put in front of them. Adam Scott and David Koechner are gifted comic actors but between this, Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse, and Hot Tub Time Machine 2 I’m beginning to wonder if both of them have lost their discriminating taste when it comes to scripts. Toni Collette and Conchata Ferrell have slightly less sterling comedic bona fides but they know how to deliver punch lines, or rather you’d figure they would. The comic work is so bad in this film that I wonder if some months down the road we’ll see an outtakes reel with all the takes that worked. This is either a stunning disappointment or the worst editing job in movie history (non-The Room division).

I’m not the kind of person who believes a movie has to be 100% original or that there’s no use going over old things trying to find a new perspective. That said, I’m not entirely sure what this movie brings to the space of vaguely supernatural Christmas horror movies that kids can watch genre that Gremlins didn’t do much better 31 years ago. There’s even a scene in Krampus where all of the attacking minions are coincidentally Gremlin-sized and in spots it feels a lot like the toy store scene in Gremlins. I would believe it was an homage if Krampus didn’t suffer so badly in the comparison.

But while I was thoroughly unimpressed by Krampus, I could not say the same for the young man sitting a few rows behind me. When the film was over he turned to his dad and excitedly said, “that was the most twisted ending ever” and while I found the last ten minutes of the film deeply unsatisfying, it worked for that preteen and he’s the audience this movie wants. He and his friends command a fair amount of capital and this time of year can get their parents, siblings and friends to go to the movies with them. I can shout from the rooftops (or more productively from here on the pages of ComicMix) and it’s not going to cost Krampus a lick of business but this kid who just saw his first bleak ending could put 12 more people in seats.

God bless us everyone indeed.

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